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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 39: ‘What you said there was a grotesque understatement’

Insight18.06.214.25 PM by Lucie Heath

This week the inquiry continued to hear from former employees of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), as well as two employees from the London Fire Brigade (LFB). Lucie Heath reports

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This week the inquiry heard from various employees from Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation and the London Fire Brigade. Lucie Heath reports #UKhousing

On Monday, the country marked the fourth anniversary of Grenfell Tower fire. The inquiry did not sit on this day as a sign of respect to the victims and survivors.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw the wrapping up of the mammoth five-and-a-half day evidence session from Janice Wray, former health and safety manager at KCTMO, which managed all councils homes in the borough on behalf of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC).

We then heard from two LFB employees who were responsible for overseeing fire safety within Kensington and Chelsea, followed by two KCTMO caretakers who regularly worked at Grenfell Tower.

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‘The residents of Grenfell Tower were living in a building with an AOV system which had effectively been condemned as non-compliant’

Last week, Ms Wray (pictured above) was grilled over some of the key recurring issues of this module of the inquiry, including the huge backlog of fire risk assessment actions KCTMO had built up in the early 2010s.

Other areas discussed were KCTMO’s failure to implement a fire door inspection programme as requested by the LFB and the organisation’s failure to create personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs) for disabled residents.

This week the inquiry picked up with another major issue from this module: Grenfell Tower’s faulty automatic opening vent (AOV) system, which is used to prevent the spread of smoke in the event of a fire.

We know from previous weeks’ evidence that KCTMO learned following a fire at Grenfell in 2010 that there were issues with the building’s AOV system, however a new system was not installed until 2016. It is believed that this new system failed on the night of the fire in June 2017.

On Tuesday, Ms Wray said she was aware that the system was “old” and “clunky” and we saw evidence of her pushing for budget to have it replaced. However, Ms Wray also denied she was aware of the extent to which the system was failing.

Specifically, she denied ever having seen a 2011 report by KCTMO’s maintenance contractors that stated it could “no longer guarantee that the system will operate as required or that it meets fire regulation”.

Ms Wray claimed her colleagues at KCTMO must not have made her aware of the report. Lead counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC said that this was “remarkable”.

“It is now as we sit here but I can only act on the information that I had available at the time,” she said.

We then saw an email sent by Ms Wray to a colleague in 2013, in which she was advising a colleague how to respond to a query sent to him by the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders’ Association (GTLA). The GTLA was asking for an update on various fire safety matters following the 2010 fire at the tower.

The email said: “Works to repair the ventilation/extraction system which were due to commence the following week were progressed and further investigations undertaken on this system to ensure there were no other areas of concern”.

“What you say there was a grotesque understatement and there the residents of Grenfell Tower were living in a building with an AOV system which had effectively been condemned as non-compliant by the maintenance engineers but were doing so in ignorance,” Mr Millett said.

“I can’t dispute that, but I didn’t have that information so I couldn’t have provided it,” Ms Wray said.

‘Why did you allow the TMO to publish perpetually a statement that was erroneous?’

The inquiry then moved on to the topic of the lifts at Grenfell Tower. We already know that various fire risk assessments (FRAs) for the tower incorrectly stated that the building had firefighting lifts – and that lack of firefighting lifts hampered the efforts of the fire brigade on the night of the fire.

A firefighting lift is one that contains certain features that allow firefighters to transport their equipment in the event of a fire. They are required on all buildings taller than 18m.

KCTMO was aware that its lifts were not firefighting lifts. We saw minutes from a meeting in 2010 in which it was agreed that “most of the borough’s lifts meet the majority (but not all) of the criteria which define a firefighting lift”. However, from 2010 onwards, all of the FRAs for Grenfell Tower stated that it did have firefighting lift.

Ms Wray said this was largely due to a disagreement between herself and KCTMO’s fire risk assessor, Carl Stokes, over whether the building had a firefighting lift, with the latter being adamant that it did meet the criteria.

She agreed that the FRAs produced by Mr Stokes were “misleading” and insisted that she “genuinely tried” to stop him from calling the lifts firefighting lifts.

“You did understand did you, maybe you didn’t, that the FRA, although prepared by Carl Stokes as an independent person retained by you, was your FRA. It was the TMO’s FRA,” said Mr Millett (pictured above), to which Ms Wray responded “yes”.

“So if that’s the case, why did you allow the TMO to publish perpetually a statement that was erroneous?”

“I can only reiterate what I said is that he remained very firmly of a view and his view wasn’t shakeable,” Ms Wray responded.

In his witness statement to the inquiry, Mr Stokes said KCTMO provided him with confirmation that the lifts in Grenfell Tower were firefighting lifts. Ms Wray said his statement is “not an accurate reflection of the many discussions we had on this issue over quite a long period of time”.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t spend more time doing that’

This moved the inquiry on to another major theme of the week: the general competence of Mr Stokes as a fire risk assessor.

In previous weeks we had been given glimpses into the fact that the LFB appeared to be unhappy with the service Mr Stokes was providing KCTMO. On Wednesday we heard from two former fire safety team leaders at the LFB, Rebecca Burton (pictured above) and Nicolas Comery, who were both able to provide more insight into the concerns.

As fire safety team leaders covering the Kensington and Chelsea area, Ms Burton and Mr Comery were responsible for a group of people who carried out fire safety inspections in the borough and decided whether enforcement notices needed to be served.

The conflict between Mr Stokes and the LFB seemed to stem originally from the issue of fire doors. We know that in the years leading up to the fire, the LFB was putting pressure on KCTMO to implement a regular inspection programme of fire door self-closers in the borough – something KCTMO was very resistant to due to a lack of resources.

On Wednesday we learned that Mr Stokes had told KCTMO that its current approach to inspecting self-closers, which involved checking them when a property became void or major works were being carried out, had been agreed with the LFB’s head of enforcement. The LFB denied this.

In her witness statement to the inquiry, Ms Burton said she had a meeting with Mr Wray in 2015 in which she was “very frank” with her about Mr Stokes, telling her that “I did not think that he was providing a good service to the KCTMO”.

She told the inquiry that she had expected Ms Wray to “take the concerns to Carl Stokes… and if there wasn’t a change in his approach then I would have hoped that she would have looked for somebody else”.

When asked about this during her evidence session, Ms Wray said she raised had Ms Burton’s concerns with Mr Stokes and that he took them on board.

However, this was not the only time Ms Wray had received a complaint about the FRAs being produced by Mr Stokes.

On Tuesday we heard that an independent fire risk assessor, who had been hired by a Grenfell leaseholder looking to have a stairlift installed, told Ms Wray that the FRA for the tower was “unsuitable and insufficient as the elementary fire safety deficiencies have not been identified by the fire risk assessor”.

Ms Wray said she discussed this complaint with her manager, Barbara Matthews, and that they briefly talked about re-procuring the fire risk assessor role, but that this idea did not take off.

Concerns were raised about Mr Stokes again in May 2017, one month before the fire, when a colleague of Ms Wray’s reviewed multiplied FRAs he had conducted with two health and safety specialists.

Again Ms Wray was told that the FRAs were not “suitable and sufficient” and that the advice given to KCTMO was “completely wrong”.

“Did you take any action at that point to reconsider Carl Stokes’ suitability as a fire risk assessor for the TMO?” asked Mr Millett.

Ms Wray said that she “would have looked in detail at the criticisms”, but that she cannot recall taking any action to ensure the other FRAs carried out by Mr Stokes were reviewed.

It is worth noting that during his evidence session, Mr Stokes said he believed he had always carried out fire risk assessments “to the best of my ability”.

However, this week’s evidence clearly raises questions over why Ms Wray trusted Ms Stokes for such a long period of time despite being given multiple warnings that the work he was producing was inadequate.

We know that just weeks before the fire, Ms Wray turned to Mr Stokes for assurance that the cladding on Grenfell Tower was compliant with building regulations after being sent a letter from the LFB flagging the issue of external fire spread following a fire at another high-rise block in west London.

When asked about this on Tuesday, Ms Wray agreed that Mr Stokes’ response to her query was not “fully informed”.

“Did you not think that this was such a sweeping and unspecific response that it deserved the follow up from you asking the questions I’ve just asked you? What did you ask, who did you ask, what answers did you get and what investigations did you yourself conduct?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes it did and I don’t know why I didn’t spend more time doing that,” Ms Wray replied.

‘You cover the really important parts and hope, and that was it’

The inquiry finished the week hearing from Paul Steadman and Robert Regan (pictured above), two caretakers (also known as estate services assistants (ESAs)) who had experience working at Grenfell Tower.

Both painted a picture of an increasingly overworked team, which they said was compounded by the fact that KCTMO stopped replacing caretakers that left or retired and instead increased the workload of those who remained.

Part of the caretakers’ job was to carry out weekly health and safety inspections of the blocks within their patch, during which they would input any repairs into a digital system managed by KCTMO.

Mr Steadman said one caretaker would be responsible for roughly 40 blocks and that KCTMO set a time quote of between 30 and 60 minutes to inspect a building, which he said was not enough time for a large building like Grenfell Tower.

Mr Regan’s evidence largely echoed this. In his witness statement to the inquiry, he said: “This did inevitably lead to many jobs getting either left or not raised due to other commitments pushed on to the ESAs… I felt that the ESAs had too much work, which I consider akin to cutting corners.”

“The intention is to cover everything, but that wasn’t always the case. So you cover the really important parts and hope, and that was it. That’s all you can do. What can you do?”

Both Mr Steadman and Mr Regan said these issues were repeatedly raised with managers at KCTMO but that the organisation “didn’t listen”.

At this point it is impossible not to think about the impact of austerity on councils and what this has meant for people working within them. This has been a recurrent theme throughout this phase of the inquiry, with housing officers, building control officers and others explaining how they felt they simply did not have enough time and resources to do their job properly.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry continues next week.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry headlines: week 39

KCTMO allowed fire risk assessor to incorrectly state Grenfell had firefighting lift

The organisation responsible for the management and maintenance of Grenfell Tower allowed multiple fire risk assessments for the building to state that it had a firefighting lift despite knowing that this was not true.

KCTMO received multiple warnings about competency of fire risk assessor before fire at Grenfell

The health and safety manager at Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation received multiple warnings about the quality of the work carried out by the fire risk assessor employed by the organisation, including one complaint just weeks before the fire at Grenfell.

Grenfell caretakers forced to ‘cut corners’ due to time pressures, inquiry hears

Two caretakers who worked at Grenfell Tower have said they were given “too much work”, which led to “cutting corners” and repairs being “left or not raised”.

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